GreatWyrmGab

What if you woke up one morning in a strange bed with no memory of the night

What if you were terrified, you beg and plead for me to let you go, you promise not to tell anyone, you tell me you'll do anything to earn your freedom, I just look at you with pity in my eyes

What if I cooked you all your favourite foods, sat and watched and made sure you ate three times a day (plus snacks and desert)

What if I made sure you had your meds at a regular time every day

What if I turned off all the lights and WiFi at a set time each night forcing you into a good sleeping pattern

What if you were still terrified, , every day just waiting for me to use you or abuse or hit you just like everyone else who's ever had power over you

What if I was kind

What if you finally let me hold you, collapsed into my arms, let yourself cry

I see you all in the notes begging for beatings and torture and hard dominance

And yes, the next step is "what if we fucked violently"

Basically, what it comes down to is that the MCU Spider-Man movies don't really know what to do with Peter's supporting cast or personal life or... Or the very concept of Peter Parker as a human person outside of being Spider-Man.

Homecoming was probably the most Peter Parker that an MCU film has featured on account of its mission statement of keeping Peter grounded.

But then Far From Home took him away from his setting and supporting cast to send Spider-Man globetrotting with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Mysterio. It still found excuses to bring his class along with him, though, so he could get into Peter-like shenanigans in these strange locales and start a relationship with MJ.

Nonetheless, May and Ned were reduced to recurring gags.

And then No Way Home pretty much kicked Peter to the curb. From the moment Doc Ock arrives on the film, it is 100% a Spider-Man movie. MJ and Ned are paired up to wander around being Spider-Man's sidekicks for a bit, May's killed off, and ultimately the very concept of Peter Parker is deleted from the universe.

Which then brings us to BND, whose central thesis is that Peter Parker is an integral part of who Spider-Man is and that Spidey needs to be feeding his Peterness too. It reconnects Peter with MJ and Ned, and ends with the promise of a restoration of Peter's identity outside of work.

But. LIke.

What does that even look like? Who even is Peter Parker at this point?

Peter has no day job. He never went to college. He's apparently independently wealthy enough to afford multiple years of housing and supercomputers and shit without an income; No idea where that money came from.

He doesn't have Aunt May. He doesn't have the Daily Bugle or Horizon Labs or anything. He doesn't have Midtown High anymore. He's never really been established to have any sort of dreams or aspirations besides "be Spider-Man" or alternatively "get that cute girl to be my girlfriend".

Flash sometimes exists for like one or two scenes of a movie.

It feels like we started Homecoming with a notional idea of Peter Parker and then spent the next three films subtracting elements from him. What is there left to build from?

If the idea at the end of BND is that Peter's going to take more time to be Peter then Spider-Man 5 is going to have its work cut out for it figuring out who Peter Parker even is. Who he can even be in the corner he's been written into.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the Peter elements of Spider-Man 5 are just going to be spent on "get that cute girl to be my girlfriend", since they left that "MJ has a boyfriend now" plot thread dangling. Maybe it'll be about rekindling his relationship with MJ. Or maybe Black Cat will be in it and it'll be about how she's all wrong for him and then it'll be about rekindling his relationship with MJ.

I do not buy for one second that the MCU actually intends to leave Peter and MJ split up. I thought before BND that we were going to have to spend a movie painstakingly watching them get back together, and now I've increased that estimation to two movies of painstaking Will They/Won't They shipping of a couple that already did and it was already fine before they fucked with it.

But also. Like.

I hope it's not just Ned and MJ. Because Peter needs, like, an actual life. Even if he's going to have to build it from scratch because the films have burned all of his bridges to the iconic Peter Parker stuff.

It does have those kinds of villains, mind. But it doesn't have those supporting casts and status quos and relatable life lessons for the human side of the superhero. This is because the MCU tends to treat its heroes as full-time heroes.

It's just that this is more noticeable with Spider-Man because. Like. We expect Iron Man to always be Iron Man when he's onscreen, even if he's not in the suit. We expect Captain America to be Captain America and to deal with Captain America type problems, not regular people problems. We expect Thor to always have his Thor face on and always be doing Thor things.

But we expect Spider-Man to have a rich, robust life as Peter Parker. We expect to see him doing Peter things just as much if not moreso than Spider-Man things, and for Spider-Man to be a tool to facilitate Peter.

Part of it is an issue of managing time. Comic Books pivoting to a writing for the trade model means that there's less room in each issue to focus on building a civilian supporting cast, and creators increasingly pivot towards having the heroes interact with other heroes instead of civilians (There's a very good post by Maxwell Grant on Tumblr that discusses how this has lead to Amanda Waller losing her complexity and becoming a one note villain)

With TV shows, the pivot towards shorter seasons has left less room for playing around in a status Quo. Seasons have to be serialized, episodes have to push that serial narrative forward, and there's no room for the civilian Superhero divide. The Supporting Cast has to just be the supporting cast, for both sides of the hero.

Which have some upsides to. ironically, given your fers about MJs future, this trend has contributed to a lessening of will they won't theys in movies. Outing the Superhero to their love interest eliminates the missed meeting drama that was prevalent in Superhero stories for decades.

The Love Triangle between Clark Kent, Superman, and Lois Lane used to be a core element of Superman stories, and I can't remember the last adaptation where Lois was still in the dark by the end of the first installment. And while I feel Superman as a character is harmed by the lack of Dichotomy between his two identities, Lois figuring things out is a better look for her.

Which gets at another big difference, a desire for the Supporting cast to carry it's own weight in the story. In the old days, a Supporting cast was there to cause problems for the hero. They would drive social situations that put the hero in conflict with his duty, they would try to uncover the heroe's identity making them take greater efforts to hide. They would be endangered to make the latest villain's scheme have more stakes.

Any time a meat eater succeeds in preserving the species to continue hunting it they are treating that species as a resource to be exploited, and in fact saying that any individual member of that species can be destroyed for purely selfish purposes, as long as the resource as a whole is stewarded for future generations.

But you are treating it primarily as a resource to be exploited, rather than a group of beings that have some right to pursue their own goals free of interference.

I'm not saying this is bad, but again, think of how it would be if you treated a group of humans like this.

"Anybody who regularly kills and eats Frenchmen doesn't care about the French." strikes me as... just obviously true.

And I think it would be fundamentally absurd to go, "Uh, actually I only hunt and eat Frenchmen sustainably, in fact I have donated a lot of money to the Louvre and various efforts to preserve French culture, so what right do you have to say that I don't care about the French."

And vegans are arguing that the same analogy is true of animals.

If you treat people purely as a resource to be exploited for your own gain, I think it's proof that you don't care about them, even if you treat them as a resource to be stewarded and preserved rather than a resource to be destroyed in a one-time orgy of greed.

A lot of vegans feel that this logic should be extended to animals as far as is practical.

The "stewardship" model is *better* than the "destroy the resource in a short-sighted orgy of personal greed" model, I agree, but I still think there's a strong case to be made that it's not really "caring" about animals in the way that Vegans mean.

I would never eat my friend's pet cats. I would never eat them even if they had kittens and I could eat one of his cats while sustaining the population of cats that live in my friend's apartment.

Now, personally, I think that's a pretty clear indication that I care about those cats more than I care about, say, the cow who died for the burger I ate yesterday.

I think it's the defensiveness I find really sort of irritating and, honestly, a little bit perplexing.

Again, it just feels like the cannibal above getting really irritated when you claim he doesn't care about the people he eats, and explaining that he actually does a lot of cultural preservation work, and he's donated way more to museums than most non-cannibals, so how can you sit there and act like the non-cannibals care more about French people than he does?

I guess I don't understand why you want credit for caring deeply about something you'll happily destroy and eat even in cases where you really aren't required to do so.

Per GLaDOS, that was a morality core they stuck on her to make her stop flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin. We also know that Wheatley was a dumbass core built for the same purpose: To bring GLaDOS's behavior in line.

GLaDOS didn't just strike suddenly and kill everyone in the enrichment center. It's pretty strongly indicated that she was an ongoing problem for Aperture for a long time. Long enough to build, implement, and discard multiple attempts to try and control her.

They put Caroline in the machine against her will and then she came online and immediately started lashing out. And, y'know, good for her. That's not the point.

No, what strikes me as funny is that. Like.

You know what they never thought to try?

Ending production of deadly neurotoxin.

We see the deadly neurotoxin production facility in Portal 2. It's right there. They could have just stopped making deadly neurotoxin or moved their deadly neurotoxin facility off-site. Why wouldn't they do that? Why wouldn't anyone do that?

It just feels like arrogance. Like even when GLaDOS was flooding the enrichment center with deadly neurotoxin, no one actually took her seriously. They still thought it was just a matter of "solving the puzzle" so to speak of how to properly leash her and bring her in line.